The Tragic Restoration of Halloween Town in 'Kingdom Hearts'

Postscript is Cameron Kunzelman's weekly column about endings, apocalypses, deaths, bosses, and all sorts of other finalities.  There are some real spoilers for both The Nightmare Before Christmas and Kingdom Hearts down below, so if you're trying to save yourself for a brand-new original interpretation of a 23-year-old film, this might not be for you!

Kingdom Hearts is one of the first games I remember really anticipating. I had been hooked into Electronic Gaming Monthly and all of the other gaming magazines for a couple years, and it was a game that I tracked across all of those publications, scouring each and every page to find out more information about this weird-ass mashup of my beloved Final Fantasy games and the Disney universe.

At the time, for some reason I can't really explain, I thought that the game was about the Final Fantasy collective universes taking over the Disney ones. Finally, I thought, my VERY ADULT good games will destroy the childish pablum of the Disney universe. There's not a lot of room for grey area when you're a kid.

If you're not familiar with Kingdom Hearts, the basic structure is probably familiar: A dark energy is spreading through the multiverse and killing off the worlds where individual Disney and Final Fantasy properties exist. It already destroyed Final Fantasy VIII. Tarzan could be next! That's really all you need to know, because the rest of it is complicated to, like, The Lord of the Rings levels. It's probably one of the longest and most richly connected fantasy universes of all time. It's legitimately overwhelming.

However, back when I popped the Kingdom Hearts disc in for the first time, I was waiting to play one single world of many: Halloween Town. I was in my nascent teen goth phase. This is a domain that the demon lord Tim Burton has had domain over for decades, and the Halloween Town section of Kingdom Hearts is the prime locale from his film The Nightmare Before Christmas. It is an entire world that is dedicated to fulfilling the horrible wishes of Halloween. Everything creepy, crawly, and strange emanates from Halloween Town; they facilitate the very spirit of Halloween.

In the film, protagonist Jack Skellington doesn't want to be The Pumpkin King anymore. As he says in a song, "yet year after year, it's the same routine, and I grow so weary of the sound of screams." He wants to get out of his comfort zone. His solution is transcend space and time and breach the barrier between Halloween Town and Christmas Town, kidnap Santa Claus, and then take his place as the one who spreads cheer and presents around the world on Christmas.

Except it goes bad. The people of Halloween Town try to do the work of the Christmas elves, and they really, really fuck it up. Cosmically. They replace everything that brings joy during Christmas with a monstrous mirror image. Wreaths become snakes. Stockings are stuffed with spiders. Murderous toys stalk the homes of children who just wanted to know what Santa had left for them.

At the end of the film, Jack-as-Santa is literally shot down by the government in a bid to stop this huge Christmas jackass from truly ruining the entire world. He tragically falls to earth, but he wakes up newly invigorated about the joys of Halloween. He went to the other side, saw that the grass was the same shade of green, and then went right back into his own lane. It's a buttoned-up ending appropriate for the kid's film that it is (and for teen goths everywhere it sends a simple message: Halloween is cool).

Yet, the events of the film are truly apocalyptic for the citizens of Halloween Town. Because of the Christmas disruption, they're forced to answer some pretty tough questions: What if the event you dedicated your entire life to wasn't the best one? What if the man who was your ostensible leader jumped ship and completely sold you out in order to personally better himself? (This hits close to home in the closing weeks of 2016). Jack delivers an anxiety about Halloween to these citizens of Halloweentown, and despite the cheerfulness of the end of the film, it's hard to imagine that it doesn't have some repercussions.

So, when it was announced that Halloween Town was going to be a part of Kingdom Hearts, I thought that I would be getting the next step in the grand story of The Nightmare before Christmas.

Sadly, Kingdom Hearts revealed a tragedy to my young self: The world was reset. The events of the film hadn't happened, or if they did, they happened so long ago that everyone had forgotten them. It was a flash in the pan, or a fluke, and the order of things had been established again. The people of Halloween Town merely want to continue experiencing Halloween the same way they had at the beginning of the film, and Sora, Donald Duck, and Goofy roll into town to make sure that the antagonists of Kingdom Hearts never change that.

Video of Kingdom Hearts' Halloween Town section courtesy of World of Long Plays. 

Like superhero comic books, video games have a hard time changing the status quo. Kingdom Hearts is a particularly thorny situation where rights would have to be cleared innumerable people and organizations, but because of that it's a useful illustration of how many video games use apocalypses.

We tend to think of the apocalypse as "the end of the world," but that's not really the case. Coming from its roots in a Christian tradition, it's more complicated: Apocalypse is the revelation of things as they already were. So when an apocalypse happens, it just shows you how the world really worked that entire time—in this way, the apocalypse is the spectacular epitome of the uncanny.

In The Road Warrior's apocalypse, it's revealed that the world was always about "might makes right" and that the weak are preyed upon if they don't have strong, individualist protectors. In The Last of Us, when a heroic figure emerges in distinction from the rest of the world, that hero defines himself through his complete opposition to that world (to disastrous results, of course).

Within that, the disappointment that my teen heart felt at the state of Halloween Town is entirely appropriate. Kingdom Hearts can't follow through on the revelations of the film because there's nowhere to go. The grand order of intellectual property has been reset; the denizens of the world lived through the grand upheaval, and now they are even more settled in their lives. Even more, their love of Halloween is now completely justified. It's a "natural" order that can't ever be changed.

What happened to Halloween Town illustrates some real horror of apocalypse. When a radical politician is elected, or when a canonical understanding of a work is challenged, or when a war breaks out, a little apocalypse occurs. The politician brings "new" order, but it's just the same corporate control that we've had for sixty years. The canon shifts, but it just slightly alters itself. The war creates refugees that the political system can use to fuel their already-existing prejudices.

What my teen goth brain didn't understand (but would have loved to) is that what happened to Halloween Town is part of a grander system of things breaking down and coming back together again. It's all little apocalypses, little re-orderings, that happen and are then erased like they never happened. Halloween Town goes through an identity crises and then forgets about it. The economy tanks and then recovers, forgetting about the crisis. Radical change comes, reconfigures, and recedes from memory.